One imagines that the denizens remaining in Your Party look upon Zack Polanski’s Greens with growing envy. The latter have successfully captured the support of the significant Left-of-Labour vote, energizing a party that was formerly more associated with Nimbyish conservationism and progressive-tinged ecology, but which has now become the unrivaled vehicle of Corbynism 2.0.

It didn’t have to be this way. Such was the promise of Your Party in its early days that even as unreflective a figure as Keir Starmer might have paused to wonder if a Corbynista outfit could prove his final undoing, cannibalizing votes to his Left just as Reform ate away at his Right.

But he needn’t have worried. It has been announced that the breakaway Left-wing party will support a series of disjointed independent candidates’ campaigns at the locals in May, as opposed to mounting its own nationwide challenge. In Tower Hamlets, it will endorse Aspire, a separate party which is already the dominant ruling group on the council, despite a history of engaging in corrupt and illegal practices (its party leader, Lutfur Rahman, was found guilty of electoral misconduct in 2015). In Newham, Redbridge and Birmingham, too, the Corbynites will back pro-Gaza independents taking on entrenched local Labour oligopolies.

In each case, this strategy shows that the group’s role is now not as a potential national party of government aiming to challenge Labour, but instead as a purveyor of an inchoate Islamo-Leftism. That movement exploits a heady mix of local grievance in pockets of post-industrial Britain that the old labor movement long ago vacated, on the one hand, and disgust at Israel’s treatment of Palestine on the other. This political alliance of old-fashioned hard Leftists, along with more diffuse ethno-sectarian voter blocs, makes good use of the so-called biradari system of Islamic “community groups”, mosque leaderships, organized small businesses and clan-based patronage networks to secure votes by the tonne.

Here, too, the Green Party has made serious headway, but with a crucial difference. It has much more successfully hoovered up the support of a far larger social category than the Boomer perma-activists. Rather, the Greens have become the political home of the young and disaffected. They now hold the woke, broke graduate with no future, radicalized by humanities courses and our memetic media environment into all the ultra-progressive cultural posers of our time.

There is, of course, an opportunity that could squeeze Your Party back into relevance. Imagine, for a moment, the possibility of a national agreement between Polanski and Corbyn. Call it the Green-Left Alliance, or the People’s Alliance. Build it around a slick, unified comms strategy targeting disappointed Labour voters with simple, broad, anti-war, environmentalist, pro-Palestine, pro-migrant and pro-welfare messaging. Blame “the billionaires” for everything. Get a handful more Labour MPs, councillors and trade union leaders on board with clipped-up, TikTok and Insta-friendly rallies across the country. This may not be a party that has the answers for the country, but it would have posed an existential threat to Labour.

But this scenario has been torpedoed by the vanity of Zarah Sultana. The former Labour MP and initial face of Your Party engaged in public kamikaze tactics and allied herself with bizarre Trotskyist sects to try to bounce herself into a leadership position. The civil war that ensued reached comic proportions that would have surprised those unfamiliar with the strange, esoteric habits of the contemporary far Left. But it was par for the course for the tiny groupuscules which clung onto Your Party like limpets, and which still define and divide themselves according to their relative positions on the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Corbynism 2.0 will, then, happen largely without Corbyn. His vehicle is left fighting over Polanski’s scraps, attaching itself to already existing local sectarians, left in the dirt as the Greens ride the Left’s current zeitgeist with more vigor than he and his party could ever muster.

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Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.

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